So I have my first Glide Page working really well and am very pleased with it. The people using it have been very receptive.
So I would now like to push ahead and expand the app. My first attempt was mainly a learning exercise and trying out Glide. I now feel confident enough to take it forward.
I want to use it to manage a touring exhibition. It would be used to
Display a list of objects that travel with the exhibition. Photos, insurance values, maintenance instructions etc
For users to write condition reports for each object - with photos.
Maintenance log for exhibition staff to log issues with the exhibition. This is the part that is already up and running.
Sharing installation and dismantling schedules - and allowing museums to comment on them
Crate list with sizes and weights that travel with the exhibition
All basic stuff and easy to do with a good database.
I have been running it all in 2 x separate Airtable databases for several months. 1 for Logistics (Schedules, maintenance log etc) and the other for creative (Objects). But I really need a good front end.
My problem is - as I have to connect the whole Airtable base to Glide - and there is a lot of info in there - I will smash through my 5GB limit (starter plan) very quickly. I won’t need to use most of the photos - only a select few.
I could set up a separate Airtable base and sync the data into it - then link that base to Glide - but it would be read only and I am trying to avoid having too many databases.
It would be nice if I could select in Glide which tables and views to sync - but I guess that is not likely to happen for a while - if ever.
Does anyone have any bright ideas? Seems a shame to have to upgrade to the $99 plan just so I can store data I don’t even need!
How many images do you have? 5GB is on average 2500 photos.
I would say that if your images are already stored in Airtable, then you can continue to use airtable’s storage as long as the url points to that external storage…BUT, since Airtable started expiring and reissuing link urls every few hours (which started in November), I think glide started taking over and actually stores your Airtable images in their storage. This is so the url remains stable when using it with glide. I’m not 100% sure though, so someone else will have to confirm or deny what I said. If that’s the case, then you wouldn’t be able to rely on Airtable to take the brunt of your existing image storage.
If images do stay in airtable’s storage, then it would work for the initial batch of data, but any future images uploaded through the app would still use Glide’s storage.
You could consider some kind of third party storage for all of your images, but that would mean new urls and updating those urls in your database. Plus you’d still have the issue of new images being stored in Glide’s storage (unless you build some outside service to transfer those images to a third party storage, and update the url in your table).
Other than that, I may have to yield to someone with more Airtable experience. I’m just not sure how glide handles airtable’s changing links.
This is an experimental reply from a bot. Please like it if it’s correct.
When you connect an Airtable base to Glide, any images stored in Airtable will be automatically stored in Glide. This ensures that the images remain accessible to users of Glide projects, even if the Airtable URL expires. However, these attachments count toward your Glide team’s file storage quota. Exceeding your file storage quota can result in your Glide projects becoming inaccessible to users until you upgrade to a higher plan. Removing an Airtable base from your Glide team (e.g. by deleting projects that use it) will free up storage space within minutes, and unused attachments are removed from Glide within 72 hours. Glide • Airtable
That’s exactly what I found - as soon as I imported my Airtable base - I ran out of storage space. It has a lot of images.
I like your idea of using an external storage solution for the images though as I think Glide only needs a URL to point to - so guess the image could be anywhere (except Airtable as those links expire).
Wonder if I can get Dropbox to work with it - and some automation from Make to get them into Dropbox
Maybe not - probably more trouble than its worth. Shame - I can’t justify to my client $99 p/month just for more storage
Dropbox may work, but glide advises against it. Same with google drive. It may work, but those services aren’t designed for something like hosting images for external usage. Especially on a large scale. I do use Google Drive for only a handful of images…and that’s only because I haven’t uploaded them to glide…yet. For me it works, but it is a much smaller scale in my case. In the past, others have eventually had problems with images becoming inaccessible periodically. I would recommend a service that’s designed for hosting and serving up images.
Cloudinary might be a good solution, so I found this. Looks like it should store images in cloudinary and give you a url. You’ll just have to find a way to make the existing attachment column inaccessible to glide so it doesn’t try to take over your storage.
Cloudinary has an auto upload feature where images are automatically uploaded when used.
I had the image uploaded to glide then copied to cloudinary and then deleted the image in glide
Maybe you actually get all the images loaded to cloudinary directly from airtable if all the images were shown in glide first or potentially just creating a cloudinary link in airtable using auto upload
